The Tides of War
by Alamorlan
Summary: As a man before the great war, Abel was a soldier for his country and a benevolent soul. As a man after the great war, he is a scarred husk of what he once was, but he will continue moving forward. His future is the future of man, and though war never changes, he will try to the best of his ability to change mankind instead, for his home is lost, but his humanity still lives.
1. Chapter 1

**A warning to you all:**

 **This story is not meant to be happy, or fulfilling. I fully intend for this story and any sequels it inspires to be majorly depressing, especially by the end. It won't be fully funny or upbeat. It is truly a man born before the war that lived in Virginia witnessing the aftermath of the destruction of his entire livelihood. Do with that what you will.**

* * *

 **Prelude: A World Reborn in Fire**

* * *

 **War...**

 **War never changes...**

 **Before registered, recorded history, long preceding the collective economization of combat, humanity first found a way to destroy itself in the art of the hand and stone. In the back-when times, mankind fought over survival, for land and food, and for rites of passage. The men that charged into combat slaughtered their enemies for the spoils of war- life-giving clothing and water.**

 **In the ages of iron and steel, kings and lords sent their subjects to fight argumentative battles over petty squabbles between families. They killed hundreds of thousands over the course of only a few short decades, and the killing continued. Despite the fact that survival was all but guaranteed, men still killed one another for trivial gains.**

 **By the times of the sixteenth century, the beginning of the age of musket and bayonet, men had become so efficient in wiping themselves off of the face of the earth that wartime became a way of life. Men, women, and children spoke of the war as if they were regarding the Sunday news by the fire. For mankind, war was a collection of civilized and political means by which an end was reached. To humanity, the end justified those means.**

 **When the twentieth century revolutionized combat technology forever, men could destroy one another in groups of hundreds or thousands in the blink of an eye, all without seeing the faces of those they killed. Combat then was for reasons of humane law and moral code. The long-romanticized view of battle was eschewed for a practical and applicative approach. Still, man tried its best to seek its own destruction.**

 **In the twenty-first century, when the protective bubble weaved by millennia of armed conflict burst and spread the hellfire of nuclear annihilation over the barren ashes of those who once called earth home, man finally succeeded in bringing the world to its knees. Their nuclear war was over oil, nuclear material, and food resources.**

 **There were few who survived the atomic obliteration of their homes without reaching the safety of large underground security chambers, the vaults. Those that witnessed the destruction of their daily lives and homes became shells of themselves, their flesh and minds rotting into oblivion due to the radioactive air.**

 **All except one.**

 **For on the day that nuclear fire was released from the very fingertips of every government and military on earth, one man was completely spared the hell of the wastes. He fought for his country, witnessed the atrocities of the greatest war of mankind, and gave his effort to the betterment of society...**

 **but his service to mankind is not over; he will soon bear the weight of humanity on his shoulders. For though the reasons for the war have changed...**

 **War...**

 **War never changes...**

* * *

Awash in flame.

The world, his entire existence was awash in the red flames of nuclear fire, rather becoming of a nation that spurned the other nations of the world enough to provoke a preemptive strike that resulted in a retaliatory set of launches, and the chain continued.

Abel stared from the entrance of his small cliff-side bunker as the mushroom clouds in the far-off distance rose into the sky, spewing ash and smoke into the air for miles in every direction. The red flames of hell spread over the landscape before his eyes, torching buildings, trees, grass, men, women, and children alike. An irradiated, overbearingly hot wind blew with a harsh whisper through the burning Virginia Commonwealth.

He felt tears escaping his eyes as he watched his hometown in the great bowl of Virginia's valleys fling dust, the remains of the houses and people that rested there, into the mix of smog blanketing the earth. He was lucky (or unlucky) enough to be moving a few supplies to his fallout shelter at the time of the nearby detonations, but his family, his home, was within the blast radius of the first few bombs. All he saw was a mighty flash, and then suddenly everything was gone.

Abel dropped to his knees in the open doorway of the bunker, the muscles around his eyes twitching in horror, anguish, and fury. His wife of four years and his daughter of three had been in the town before the dropping of fire from the skies. They were close enough to the blast that they would have been nearly instantly vaporized, and so while he was devastated by their loss, a small part of him was thankful that they hadn't been on the outskirts of the explosion like himself and some of the more unfortunate people in the cars on the highway a few miles to the east. He could see the small specks of metal and broken glass from the mountainside, one of the tallest in the state.

He closed his eyes and looked at the ground for a moment, his eyelids flashing red and black as the annihilation in front of him bellowed smoke and fire in alternating patterns. Had this been what his service in the Anchorage Campaign had bought him? A surviving chance while his family and his life were destroyed? Was he meant to be thankful to whatever deity looked down upon him from the heavens that he wasn't among the dead? He didn't feel thankful. All he felt was that he wanted to be down there with his family, becoming ashes in the wind.

His vision shifted between the throbbing blur of red and black before him and a hazy mixture of colors that raged forth from his head as his mind swam in his despair. A new wave of tears rushed forth and spilled over his cheeks and stubbly chin to fall to the ground below. There, the heat that overtook his world made the drops evaporate in just a few seconds. He felt his skin protest as radiation continued to sweep over him, and he slammed his fists into the ground in front of him, furious at his country, at his country's enemies, and at himself, all for the same reason.

The world was over, his family dead, and he blamed himself just as much as he did the other two parties. He had been a Colonel once, during the initial Anchorage campaign. He could have stayed in the army and reached a General rank. He could have stopped this.

But he had a family to stay with. They were gone now.

A bright, white light filled his eyes once more, and he looked up from his prostrated position on the ground in time to watch another nuclear missile detonate over his hometown. He put up an arm to cover his eyes as he watched the buildings there evaporate into nothingness, and his eyes widened as he watched the shockwave born from the explosion spread out past the burning trees of the mountain.

He screamed in terror as that same nuclear shockwave slammed into his bowing form and launched him backwards through the doorway of the fallout shelter. His skin cracked and he felt bile escape from his mouth as he flew backwards, before his head slammed against a wall and everything blurred. His last vision was the door of the fallout shelter sliding itself shut, sensing that there was no one in the doorway anymore.

Then, all he saw was white, and he let it embrace him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Assume that Pip-Boys were a bit more intuitive than in game for this story. I know of some features I would have definitely added to a portable computer that fits to the arm.**

* * *

 **Chapter One: A Brave New World**

* * *

A cough, then a few more. A flash of light and the view of a pipeline on the ceiling.

Pain.

Pain everywhere.

Abel wheezed out a host of dust-particles and gasped in a deep, deep breath. Above him, a broken pipeline on the ceiling screamed as steam escaped from it by a hole in the body of one of the pipes. Beyond that, everything was blurry for a few moments, but he eventually managed to blink the dust and dreariness from his eyes to see that he was inside the fallout shelter that he had made his way to prior to the first detonations.

His brows furrowed a bit at that recognition, and his mind kicked into gear. He had just witnessed a nuclear detonation less than a few miles away, and had even been knocked back by the shockwave. The impact, blast, or radiation each should have killed him in their own rights, but even though he was feeling quite strained due to having been unconscious in one position for a while, he felt perfectly fine. He remembered feeling his skin crack, but upon looking down at his hands, he saw that they were perfectly fine- he was even missing a blemish on the back of his left hand.

His left arm held an object with a glowing green light, the Pip-Boy 3000X Prototype, which every field or flag officer (retired or otherwise) was required to equip following Operation: Anchorage after a mandate in June of 2077 for training and emergency reasons. It was most certainly useful before the bombs fell, but he was unsure if it would function properly after what it had just gone through. He raised it up to his face and winced at the bright green light before turning off the over-bright mode and swapping to the data section to check the date and time.

All of his extremities were in pristine condition according to the Pip-Boy, and his vitals were perfectly healthy. That was at least reassuring. He switched to the settings and found the general statistics section, where he selected "date and time," and immediately felt his face blanch white. The date presented to him by his little piece of RobCo tech was August 17, 2277. Considering that he had headed to the shelter and saw bombs drop on October 23, 2077, that was a bad sign. Either his Pip-Boy was off, or he had been out for 200 years.

He shook his head and gathered his wits. Humans didn't live that long, so there was no way he was officially 235 years old. Abel checked the logs of the Pip-Boy for errors or something that would indicate that the device was broken, but he wasn't sure if he was confident enough to say that it was. From what he had seen and worked on, the 3000 model Pip-Boys were indestructible and practically malfunction-proof. His fears were confirmed when he saw an error dated for October 23, 2077 that listed severe injuries and radiation levels, and then thousands of entries listing "slight healing," or "radiation level decrease," or "no change" every day for 200 years.

Upon closer examination, he concluded from what he knew about nuclear weapons (more than most in the US Armed Forces) and medicine (a course was required for officers later in the war) that these reports were mostly consistent with receding radiation over a long time period, but that his injuries seemed to heal in an inordinately short amount of time. By all accounts, he should have been dead or at least comatose and then died after slamming headfirst into the wall at the speed of a nuclear shockwave, but the report showed that his vital signs and extremities fully recovered within a week.

So how had he survived in a cave with no food, water, or movement for 200 years? That just wasn't scientifically possible for a human to do.

After pondering over this question for a few moments, he came to no conclusion and instead decided it was time to at least check on the outside world. If it had really been 200 years, he would be able to move around a bit so long as he stayed out of the ground-zero zone of the bomb that hit his hometown. If it hadn't been 200 years and his device was incorrect, then he'd hopefully be killed by the radiation as it was supposed to be the first time around. It was a beneficial scenario in either direction, and so he headed to the personal armory and geared up.

"Only the best for our boys in the Armed Forces... Yeah, right, but only for us officers, even the retired ones. The guys under us didn't stand a chance. Damned bureaucrats," he grumbled as he stumbled into his stockpile of government-funded, high-condition weapons, ammunition, and armor. The folks in D.C. had been happy to fund a fallout shelter for one of their top-performing officers, but if he'd asked them to build another for the enlisted men that had lived on his street, they would have had a cow. It didn't matter, because none of his friends had gone up to the shelter with him on the day of the detonations, which no one had predicted, but the thought was what mattered.

Abel looked out over the heap of items and had trouble deciding what he wanted to take with him. Of course, he was definitely going to take the laser rifle and its child weapon, the laser pistol, but he didn't know what else to grab. He fumbled his hands over a few weapons before deciding on what he was to take.

He ended up taking the laser weapons, an assault rifle, and an old .45ACP pistol, his sidearm from his service before he'd been put on "indefinite leave of absence." That was code for "requested leave for a week and received a retirement notice instead." He also somehow managed to fit his ammo stocks into his inventory of sorts, despite having a _shitload_ of the stuff lying around. That was one of the things he loved about the Pip-Boy; somehow, following putting it on, he found he could carry around the littlest things in massive amounts without getting bogged down. He wasn't sure about how that worked, but figured no one else was either now that they were dead, so he supposed it didn't matter enough to dwell on it.

He put his weapons up against the wall at the end of the armory and tapped a four-number code into a keypad, looking up with nostalgic eyes as a pod containing his old service armor, a prototype set of combat armor with an underfitting body-glove. As much as he hated abusing the perks of his service, he did enjoy the armor, at least. The suit was a test provided by the government to the special forces in the late area of the war, and had an artificial intelligence system that would make calculations for bullet-drop and other such combat necessities, though the only thing it was good for otherwise was conversation. It was a trial meant to prove a concept before installing a modified version of it into the old T-45d power-armor sets.

He ran his hand over the chest-piece of the armor before patting it on the shoulder and tugging the entire thing off of the rack. The first thing to do would be to put on the body-glove, which he did with ease, and then to attach each of the interlocking plates of combat armor. The grieves and gauntlets were the most difficult to put on, especially since it was normally expected for one's squadmates to assist with the grieves, but Abel managed to put them on himself following years of experience with them. The final pieces were the balaclava and helmet. He tugged up the balaclava from the neck of the body-glove and looked at the inside of his helmet, where most of the computing tech for the AI resided. With a slight bit of hesitation, he slipped it over his head, fastened the helmet's chin-buckle, and put the goggles over his eyes.

With a shaky hand, he reached up and put his finger on the on-switch for the AI, holding it there for what felt like a full hour before heaving a heavy sigh and pushing the button, watching as his goggles polarized to the exact lighting around him and showed him statistics such as humidity and wind levels.

"Combat Artificial Intelligence designation November ready for duty! What a fine day to die a red-blooded American! Operator, provide identification and operation number!" Abel heard in his headset.

"Brevet-Colonel Abel Jenners, operation number eight-oh-nine-three-oh-oh. It's great to be back again, CAIN," Abel replied, hearing the armor plates of his suit lock into place at his designation, the systems of the suit coming fully online and the interface of his goggles flashing with the words "AUTHORIZATION ACCEPTED" before the grizzly face of an enlisted man appeared in the top-right section of his goggles, his lips moving as if to emulate the words his suit said to him next.

"Authorization successful, Brevet-Colonel Jenners. Master Sergeant Cain reporting for duty, sir!" The animated man in the heads-up display snapped a salute and Abel imagined him going into parade-rest after relaxing it. He decided to verify everything before setting out and took a deep breath before asking the question that he already knew the answer to.

"CAIN, what is the current year?" Abel asked, looking up at the face of the enlisted man as he simulated a man bringing up a data-pad to check.

"Sir, according to my systems, it is currently August 17, 2277. You look like a tough son-of-a-bitch for a 235 year old," the suit answered back to him within a few seconds, getting a long-winded sigh out of Abel and a simulated cough of awkwardness from the AI. Instead of answering, Abel stared at a wall for about a minute before storming toward the front door of the fallout shelter.

He hit the opening mechanism, and watched as the door slid open. The light was nearly blinding.


	3. Chapter 3

**Initiate.**

* * *

 **Chapter Two: Baptism by Fire**

* * *

Everything was gone. Where everything once was, there was nothing.

Nothing but silence.

Abel turned his head in each direction to morosely survey the land before him, struggling to take in the lack of... things... that he saw before him. The dirt of the mountain upon which his feet rested was dry and cracked, and the trees that had once lushly covered the Shenandoah Valley in green were petrified in stony black, and far sparser than he could remember them ever being in the past. There was no sign of grass, nor of the wildlife that had once made this part of the nation one of the last reservations for rural, forested life. Further into the valley, a still smoldering crater was the only remnant of the town that he had once called home. Each side of the crater had a deeply cracked bit of road leading into nowhere, for most of the only highway in the area had been covered with dirt and the debris of the nuclear explosions long ago.

A deathly wind whispered into the audio receptors on his helmet; it was the only sound he could hear aside from his own breathing. The temperature gauge on his helmet showed that, for a day in the middle of August, the area was certainly colder than it should have been. Nuclear winter, though not causing a literal winter environment this far south of New York, had lowered the temperature of mid-August Virginia to just over seventy degrees for the entirety of the summer. The wind would make it feel like it was less than sixty for the current day.

"A dead shame, sir. At least we can be sure that we gave as good as we got," he heard CAIN's voice crackle through the headset. He couldn't manage to open his mouth to reply in the negative nor the affirmative, and so he settled for switching the topic before his emotions could overtake him. His mind cracked back into the place that it had often been when he was a soldier, keeping him firmly on the task of assessing the situation.

"CAIN, see what you can do about finding out the radiation levels for the surrounding area, then pull up a map leading to D.C. that avoids the most irradiated. You might protect me from radiation, and I might have survived a massive dose of it more than two centuries ago, but it's best not to take any chances," he eventually decided on his reply. Rapidly, the box that had contained the information on his environment's temperature lit up with quickly scrolling statuses, listing distances and locations along with the relative radiation levels of those areas. It went by far too speedily for him to read it all, but he caught a glimpse of something that caused him to immediately jerk his eyes straight ahead and start walking north.

 _Location: Town, destroyed | RAD: 2,667 per second_ | _Lethal_

* * *

The entrance to the Rockland Tunnels still existed, at least, though the doors were less than in operable condition. Abel ended up prying one of the blue obstacles open with the extra strength of his power armor, walking quietly down the half-destroyed tunnels, surprised to see absolutely no signs of life whatsoever, as the tunnels traveled quite a bit underground and he thought that he might at least see some insects moving about even after the extent of the nuclear bombings. Instead, there was absolutely no movement aside from the occasional flutter of a bit of cloth or a poster hanging by the skin of its teeth to a board. The creaking sounds of a pipeline sounded on occasion from overhead, but elsewise, the only sounds that Abel could hear were his footsteps, the servos on his armor, and his own breathing. CAIN remained silent. Despite having only rudimentary programming to understand emotions, even the simple AI could understand the devastation that plagued Abel's mind.

Eventually, however, Abel came to a huge, blown-out area of what used to be an overground part of the car tunnels, oddly surrounded by rocks. In the distance, there was what looked to be a group of satellite relay stations, coalesced into three conjoined complexes. The cement walls looked thicker somehow than he remembered the relay stations ever having been in the past, and the data on CAIN's map did not at all show a relay station existing halfway through the Rockland area. He walked only a few hundred yards closer before he saw movement.

Three humanoid shapes in what appeared to be heavily modified sets of power armor stood around a bluish glowing transmitter with arcing energy spewing off of it every few seconds. They carried crude looking rifles with green-tipped barrels. These rifles were strikingly similar to the plasma weapons that had seen some limited use in the military in his time, but they looked to have been modified. The plasma rifles of his time had been largely ineffectual in combat against anything wearing any form of armor, and that was mainly because sending a super-heated ball of hydrogen at a target and then making said ball stay together without burning itself out in the air or spreading its impact too widely against solid armors was virtually impossible by the standards of the 2077 U.S. Armed Forces. These rifles, however, had a barrel that glowed a sickly yet vibrant green more easily and with less unstable power arcing. Abel narrowed his eyes.

His first contact with humans after a nuclear war that presumably wiped out any remnants of the civilized world and they were better armed than he was. He didn't like that one bit.

Abel walked cautiously forward, his laser rifle in a resting position in front of him as he decided to try his luck with his first encounter. The best case scenario was that they turned out to be friendly and to speak English, both of which he hoped for, but one more so than the other. The worst case scenario was that they were hostile and they either spoke a different language or didn't speak at all. If that were the case, he would not only be outnumbered by a well armed opponent, but he wouldn't be able to understand them if he caught anything they said.

He was unfortunate.

One of the men noticed him as he approached and then seemed to snap his head to look at his companions before they all three ran to take cover behind a nearby barricade, peeking with their rifles shouldered at him. Abel had only a moment to react as he heard one of them loudly shout "FIRE!" and then saw three sickeningly green bolts of superhot plasma accelerating towards him at a speed that reached about twice what he remembered from the plasma weapons of his own time.

He barely managed to work the servos of his armor into dodging in between two bolts of green, the third bolt flying wide of him and striking the entrance to the tunnels. Immediately, he brought his own rifle up to his shoulder and made a mad sprint towards the nearest piece of cover, firing three shots from his rifle at a time. He was in an open field, and so the nearest bit of cover was on the other side of the clearing, towards the entrance of the tunnels leading from it to the southern D.C. area.

The three men in strange power armor followed him with bolts of plasma, thankfully falling short of him as his own suit worked much faster than it seemed they were capable of tracing with the surprising but still slow projectiles from their rifles. One of Abel's shots landed home on the forehead of the helmet of the man closest to him, who flinched as his head heated fractionally and the systems in his suit helmet momentarily overheated. He noticed that the flinching soldier reached up and fumbled with his helmet's locking system as his comrades attempted suppressing fire on his still sprinting form. Finally, just as the ex-Colonel reached cover, he saw the hostile manage to reboot his suit's systems and restart his firing pattern.

An alarm started ringing right then. The man who had fumbled with his suit's systems had also managed to activate communications in some way with whoever it was he was in a group with, and Able just managed to bring his rifle up in time to send a laser through the eye-socket of a helmet that was emerging from the doorway he was taking cover next to. As the man inside the power armor fell backward, he heard a clang and a voice that could only mean that the man he had just killed had backup, but they had apparently decided to take up a waiting position inside the doorway to avoid ending up like their friend. Trapped between an open field and an ambush, Abel did the only thing he could think of doing.

He sprinted through the doorway, left shoulder first, surprisingly managing to avoid tripping over the body of his fallen enemy and taking the remaining enemy off-guard as their first set of plasma bolts streaked over his shoulder and either impacted the doorway or flew into the open air behind him. Using the advantage that he hoped he would get from the slow fire-rate of plasma weapons, he barreled into the first man he saw at full speed, completely breaking a poor soul wearing only what looked to be a strange officer's uniform and using a plasma pistol.

He carried that poor soul with him for the next few feet before slamming him up against the wall in front of him with a deafening crunch, spinning around faster than most would think possible in power armor and putting a blast into the rebreather of one of the armored men at the doorway, one of three that he counted. That man felt his filter sear inside of the mask of his helmet and began to cough as his lungs were immediately filled with melted plastics, then he collapsed into a fit of asphyxiation. His fireteam managed to loose another volley of two rounds at the overly confused but adrenaline-fueled devil amongst them, one shot being fired prematurely and hitting wide, the other burning the paint on its target's right bicep but not managing much else as most of the energy failed to make contact.

Abel swung his rifle and fired a shot that glanced off of the left pauldron of his closest target, the followup hitting the side of his target's head, and the third impacting the same spot again, finally giving him results. The second shot to the head was enough to get through his opponent's helmet and he found his enemy falling dead as if he'd been shot in the side of the head by a sniper. While his third kill of the day fell, he sidestepped in anticipation of another shot from his last remaining foe.

He twisted his rifle toward his last target and felt white-hot pain as his right hand was impacted by a glance from the plasma bolt he had just tried to dodge at close range, which had ultimately cost him as he had moved too quickly and let his target catch up enough for the hostile to fire a shot relatively accurately.

Ignoring the pain of what felt like a rocket fuel fire, he thanked his lucky stars when his rifle appeared undamaged by the heat and fired as he slammed multiple shots into the last target, firing into the faceplate of his target's helmet three times, then four, then five, then six...

He let loose every last shot in his microfusion cell, losing count at twelve, only stopping after he had pulled the trigger at least a few dozen times without any light emerging from the end of his rifle.

The enemy combatant's helmet was a jet-black blast mark with a white-hot and smoking circle of metal where his rounds had all found their mark after he had killed the man. Blood oozed from underneath the helmet and covered the neck area as the melted remains of the man's head seeped out.

Abel ignored the gruesome scene he had just caused, oblivious to CAIN's shout of "HOT DAMN!" to kneel down and examine one of the bodies' armors. On one pauldron of each, he found the letter 'E' with stars circling it, and he saw an insulting mockery of the United States flag with an 'E' where the center star had been on the backs of the suits. The body of the officer had a holotag, one that he gladly took and read.

 _Name, rank, and unit: Lieutenant Chesterfield, 2nd East Coast Infantry Division_

 _Branch: Enclave Army_

 _Commissioned: 2nd of July, 2075_

 _Age: 27_

 _E Imperium Unum_

He growled as he read a mangling of one of his nation's mottoes, his attention snapping back to the area around him as he heard servos moving outside, slowly approaching the door. Without a second thought, he had the sense to grab one of the plasma rifles and then he bolted in the opposite direction, thankful that it appeared that the group that he had killed appeared to have just been an alerted patrol rather than a part of a larger group. There were a few fortifications that he sprinted past on his way out, but they appeared to only be in the first stages of being prepared, and so he continued onward, unhindered as he emerged into the opposite end of the car tunnels.

Into a new and deadly world.


End file.
